✏️ Dearest data fam

This period of the year: late April to mid-May, right in the middle of spring, is quite literally one of the best periods of the year.

(April 25th, in particular, for the meme). Fun fact: according to the Celtic calendar, Beltrane - May Day, the 1st of May - is actually the first day of summer.  Which feels optimistic. Or delusional. Hard to tell. But yeah, something shifts. You walk more. You stare at things longer than needed. Even the underground feels more like a poetic short film than a collective punishment. 

So, if your brain is currently buzzing with ideas you might not finish, here are a few tools and things we’ve been playing with:

Big open call: if you’re under the age of 30, working in data/design/art/the like, and interested in rethinking data collection through artistic experiences, make sure to apply for our Data Conversations artistic residency! It will be running October 1st-10th 2026, in Pisa, Italy, as a side-event for the Internet Festival happening October 8-11 in Pisa. The focus of the residency is on data collection and info-experiences, building participatory, artist-designed interactions that generate real insight about audiences, without feeling like a survey.

The deadline to apply is May 31st! It’s open to all creative professionals residing in EU countries, all kinds of disciplines & practices are welcome, all you have to do is send over your CV/motivation letter/portfolio + a brief description of your work to the link here - & find more information about the residency details here! 

If your mode of artistic expressions tends to roam more on the abstract side, hydra might be your thing - a live-coding video environment that runs directly in the browser (free to use, of course), able to create all kinds of video and visual effects, trippy transformations and interactive visuals, all at the tip of your fingers (provided your fingers can type out JavaScript commands ;)). Change some numbers

But wait - we also have an effect website tool of our own making: an interactive menu with all kinds of effects on blur, colour, texture, able to work with all kinds of images, videos and your webcam feed. A mid-2000’s MacBook Photobooth app but with a 2026-worthy-decision-anxiety-inducing number of options and features - have fun! 

With the current race to build the best AI-image-generation tools, it is a fact that there has been a recent proliferation of AI-generated images on the Internet, some of, errr… lower aesthetic caliber. Playing with the kitschiness of it all, youraislopbores.me is a fun website that seeks to reverts the paradigm - you type in a prompt, and instead of an AI generating your image, another player on the website draws the image - and you can do it too, “larp”-ing as an AI! 

OK, shameless self-promotion here - but we’ve recently started posting articles on Substack. And it’s… good? Less noise. More thinking. People actually finish paragraphs here. Some even have opinions. Which is why we’ll be posting more, there - expect essays, experiments, maybe a few things we shouldn’t publish, but will anyway, so subscribe here if you want to catch some of it. 

On this, we’ll let you channel your creative outlets, whatever they may be: creative coding, poetry, photography, or underwater basket-weaving - see you next month, and till then - 

Creative explorations of probabilistic plays and Gaussian games, 

From the data-fueled entity with a thousand-and-one names xx

Foraging for data, on the lookout for those quiet insights that grow in unexpected spaces…